Investments in Twitter startups come down

Now that Twitter is launching its own tools and in a way, competing with the very own app developers who helped the company in building the ecosystem, the funding in pure-play Twitter startups has come down by 50%.

“Last year (from June 2008 to May 2009), we’d seen $21.6M fly from venture capitalists and angel investors to pure-play Twitter startups. In the June 2009 to May 2010 timeframe, the investment funding dropped over 50% to $10.4M.” – source

Firefox 4 Beta 4

Beta 4 has been released and notable features includes faster graphics and audio capabilities.

Firefox 4 Beta now leverages hardware acceleration to improve graphics performance for Windows users and also allows, for the first time, the visualization of audio data within the browser.

Firefox 4 Beta introduces a new audio API to expose the raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio> elements in HTML5 to redefine how people experience sound on the Web. tweet

Firefox 4 Beta now takes advantage of the built-in graphics hardware in Windows computers with DirectX 10 to improve graphics performance. On supported hardware, Firefox will use Direct2D by default to speed up the display of content on graphically intensive websites, giving more power to the Web – details tweet

Google Account Creation Supports OpenID

Next time you create a Google account, you can sign up easily using existing yahoo/hotmail id.

To make this process simpler, we’re now using an Internet standard called OpenID which is supported by several email providers, including Yahoo!. Instead of the process above, Yahoo! users who sign up with Google see the page below with a button that sends them to Yahoo! for verification.- blog

Probably a milestone event, as OpenID adoption (and integration) from Yahoo/Google/Microsoft will bring in the necessary push to the standard.

Aside, will Yahoo lose out some of its users to Google?

Google Launches Scribe, Auto-completion Tool

Google has launched Scribe, an auto completion tool that predicts (autocompletes) the next word as you type. Give it a spin – throws interesting suggestions.